The Decider Struts Again

Nov 11, 2010

How does he walk through the world?

In case you haven't noticed, George W. Bush, the previous president of the United States to whom the current president of the United States owes so much agita, is abroad in the land again, peddling whatever foul revisionist stew has been cooked up by his ghostwriter, who must wait nightly for the smell of sulfur to come wafting up the front stairs ahead of whatever howling, blood-soaked demon it is that comes for ghostwriters, the ones who have sold their souls for whatever the going rate is these days for treason against history. But the ghost is a tradesman, more promiscuous than most. It's Bush, finally, of whom we all must wonder.

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How does he walk through the world?

His two wars drag on, as does his vandal's contempt for the rule of law. His economic intemperance and neglect live still as a consuming dry rot. New Orleans remains a shadowed, haunted place. One of the most poignant sights in the world is in the lower Ninth Ward, where, block after block, there's nothing left of the houses except the front steps. Little stairways to nowhere. That is the country he left behind.

How does he walk through the world?

Does he see the foreclosure signs or the grass only now growing on the new graves? Is he aware, even fleetingly, of everything else that disappeared into his black prisons, the loss of moral authority that has rendered the country's ideals into the functional equivalent of those lonely brick steps in New Orleans, empty vestiges leading only to loss and abandonment? Does he see what's around him — the foreclosure signs, the lines of jobless people, the abject ongoing refusal to behave like a political commonwealth? Does he even see the country he did so much to create?

How does he walk through the world?

Silly question.

Watch him in the interviews, where the only mistakes to which he will admit are mistakes in how he might have been perceived. He shouldn't have flown over New Orleans the way he did. He shouldn't have posed in front of that MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner because the mission was not accomplished. It's not the people collapsing from the heat while stranded on the I-10 bridge, or all the people who have died since he gave the speech on the aircraft carrier. The biggest mistakes he'll cop to are the ones that made him, George W. Bush, The Decider, look bad. It is an altogether astonishing performance. How could I have done that... to me?

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How does he walk through the world?

Simple.

He walks through the world the way he's always walked through the world — arrogant, swaggering, oblivious. He walks through the world as though it is his undying birthright to screw up as much as he can, because Daddy's money and Daddy's lawyers will be there to bail him out, and four generations of inherited privilege will be there to armor him against the casual ruination that follows after him. He is the center of the universe, always. Kanye West hurt his feelings. John Yoo told him it was okay to drown people. He'll even sell out his mother, telling that bizarre tale about Barbara Bush's showing him the remains of her miscarriage, because that gives him a chance to burnish his personal anti-abortion credentials, as though they matter a damn to anyone at this point, and to hell with the fact that it gives us all yet another reason to ponder whether or not the entire Bush clan was created by Charles Addams.

And that is how he walks through the world.

As to the rest of it, well, the default answer seems to be, "Read the book." Pressed a bit by Matt Lauer on torture, and pressed a bit elsewhere on the meretricious basis for his war in Iraq, he gives us the old familiar smirk, tells us how he kept all us ungrateful bastards safe. And then he recommends that we shell out thirty-five bucks to read the same old lies we heard for free over the course of eight years. In a genuine upset, he reads the audio book himself. This likely represents more reading than he did in four years at Yale, and certainly more than he did during his famous vacation at the ranch in August of 2001, when people kept pestering him with intelligence data and PDB's. This is The Decider talking again. He really has buried himself in the part.

That is how he walks through the world. Once you understand that, you can understand what this book really is. Because, God knows, this book is not an apology. (He doesn't apologize. Ask the lawyers.) It is not an explanation. (He doesn't have to explain. Read the book.) It is not even really an argument in his own defense, because he doesn't feel that he has to "debate" anyone about anything he ever did. It is merely an exercise in stubborn reiteration, much like all those moments in his speeches when he would ... talk ... really ... slowly so that rest of the dim world could keep up with the native analytical brilliance of George W. Bush. That is what this book is, and that is all that it is — the clear jar that he insists that we all gather around so as to admire his stillborn conscience.

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